The Millennial Moment

It goes back at least to Zoroaster, the Central Asian prophet who
lived some 1,400 years before Christ, whose prophecy of a coming battle
between good and evil became the official religion of the Persian
Empire. Known as millenarianism, prophecies of social upheaval find
fertile ground in periods of uncertainty and often center on specific
dates associated with the turn of a century or millennium.

As
the year 2000 draws near, we witness a swelling of the ranks of
prophetic Protestant Christian sects, whose new recruits in Latin
America and the Far East number in the millions. The Branch Davidians,
Heaven's Gate, and the Aum Shinrikyo sect that spread terror in Tokyo's
subways may be only the tip of the iceberg of extreme apocalyptic cults
inspired in part by this thousand-year turn of the calendar.

The
hardheaded skeptic notes with justification that 2000 is nothing more
than a date, no different than any other, on an arbitrary Western
calendar. Yet there is ample evidence that in the human experience,
numbers and anniversaries possess a mythic power difficult to fully
dismiss. New Year's Day is no less arbitrary than the turn of the
millennium and a whole lot less consequential as it comes once each
year. Nonetheless, for many it's a time for reflecting on the year that
has passed and for making resolutions for the year ahead. We should
expect no less, and perhaps a good deal more, from an anniversary of a
thousand years.

End of an Era

We have no
reason to fear a simple calendar change, even one that turns four
digits. However, by exquisite coincidence, this thousand-year
anniversary happens to coincide with a deep crisis that marks the end
of an era. Violent fluctuations in climate, disastrous gyrations in the
world's interlinked financial markets, massive global unemployment, an
unconscionable gap between rich and poor, an industrial system awash in
unused productive capacity, more than a billion people languishing in
absolute deprivation, disappearing soils and forests, and collapsing
fisheries all cry out that Armageddon is at hand.

It is as if
the global ecosystem has conspired with the global economy to send us a
message so powerful we could not possibly ignore it. Yet our feckless
leaders seem like little children who believe that if they close their
eyes tightly enough, the scary things will go away.

The
collapse of many of Asia's much-touted "miracle economies" in the
latter part of 1997 revealed the extent to which their prosperity was
built on a feeble foundation of reckless financial speculation, foreign
borrowing, and domestic bank lending. In November 1997, the heads of
state of the Asia-Pacific countries met in Vancouver, British Columbia
under the banner of the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation Group
(APEC). US President William Clinton, as the meeting's dominant voice,
urged Asian leaders to respond to their calamity by accelerating
deregulation, borrowing from the IMF to entice the speculators to
return, and opening their financial sectors to greater participation by
Wall Street's high roller financial houses.

In December,
representatives from 150 nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to address
the problem of human-induced climate change that threatens to submerge
island nations, flood coastal cities, disrupt global agriculture, bring
violent storms, and cause massive species extinctions. Again the United
States played the leading role. Besieged by powerful corporate
lobbyists intent on scuttling any agreement, but mindful of strong
public support for firm action, the politicians took the expedient
course and set a timetable that places the promised commitments well
beyond the terms of their present administrations. In the United
States, big business and the Republican Party immediately condemned the
agreement as harmful to the economy and promised to block Senate
ratification.

Meanwhile, the world's automobile manufacturers
were cheering record sales in the United States of high-profit,
gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, minivans, and pickups that
circumvent US pollution and mileage standards and are significantly
increasing our greenhouse gas emissions.

Leaders for a New Era

We
are gripped in the tumult of a dying era. Yet those who head our most
powerful institutions are so captive to the old era's ways of thinking,
so absorbed in advancing and protecting their own short-term political
and economic fortunes, that they can only prescribe more of the
medicine that is killing us.

Fortunately, there are real
leaders amongst us in these chaotic times, and they are not waiting for
the institutions of a dying era nor a savior descending out of the
heavens to guide us to the promised land. Far beyond the halls of power
and outside the media spotlight, these extraordinary, ordinary citizens
are moving ahead with optimism and commitment to put in place the
foundations of the new era in an atmosphere of experimentation,
creativity, compassion, love, and passion for life.

They are
building new political parties and movements, deepening their spiritual
practice, building networks of locally rooted businesses, certifying
socially and environmentally responsible products, practicing voluntary
simplicity, restoring forests and watersheds, promoting public
transportation, defining urban growth boundaries, protecting
watersheds, directing their investments to socially responsible
businesses, organizing recycling campaigns, and demanding that trade
agreements protect the rights of people and the environment.

They
are present in every country. They come from every race, class,
religion, and ethnic group. They include landless and illiterate
peasants, retired executives, ranchers, teachers, housewives, small
business owners, farmers, local government officials, inner city kids,
loggers, wealthy intellectuals with fancy academic credentials, and
reform-minded gang leaders. The majority are women. And together they
number in the millions. Fed up with the failures of elitist leadership
and distant bureaucracies, they are demonstrating the power of truly
democratic populist forms of leadership through which people take
direct responsibility for their communities and their futures.

Of
course, few of these new leaders see themselves as the architects and
builders of a new era. They simply do what they believe is right and
necessary to create decent lives for themselves, their families, and
their neighbors in the midst of a troubled world. In so doing, however,
they sow the seeds of a revolutionary power shift and lead us across
the millennial threshold to a new era. Herein lies the significance of
the millennium.

The Millennium Institute, under the leadership
of futurist Gerald Barney, has designated the three-year period 1999
through 2001 the Millennium Moment - "a shared moment when together we
- humanity - begin doing the wide range of things that we know we must
do to begin a new period of responsible living on Earth." It is an
appropriate moment to consciously choose what of our past we shall
leave behind and what we shall carry forward - both individually and as
a global society of the whole. The success of the Millennium Moment
will depend on the extent to which each and every one of us reaches
into our inner being for insights into the potentials we believe the
new era can and should express.

Making Money, Destroying Wealth

Many
among us believe we now live in a time of unprecedented prosperity and
that we have scarcely begun to tap into the potentials of a global
consumer economy. While it is true that some 20 percent of us have
enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented consumption, it is a false
prosperity. We have made a grievous error akin to that of the
profligate son who inherits a large forest and deludes himself into
believing that the faster he cuts it down and spends the proceeds on
self-indulgences, the richer he becomes. Absorbed in the admiration
society bestows on the successful, he may even be a bit disdainful of
others who have not been similarly favored.

We now face our
moment of reckoning. We who live in the industrial era have in a mere
century consumed a major portion of the natural capital it took
evolution millions of years to create. We are also drawing down our
social, institutional, and human capital. Yet, rather than setting
ourselves straight, we have compounded our problem by handing the
control of our natural patrimony to the institutions of global capital
- global corporations and financial institutions - that see life only
as a means to the end of making money. And they are making lots of
money.

Unfortunately, money isn't wealth in any real sense. It's
just a number that we accept as a claim on real wealth. And here is
where we get into trouble.

Since 1980, in the Northern
industrial countries, financial assets - a form of money - have been
growing roughly twice as fast as growth in gross domestic product (GDP)
- our most widely used indicator of economic output. This means that
claims on economic output are growing twice as fast as the actual
output of the economy, as shown in Figure 1. (For an explanation of how
the rich are increasing their claims over production without
contributing to it, see my article "Money vs. Wealth

," in YES! #2, Spring 1997.)

But
the problem goes deeper, because much of the output that GDP measures
is actually harmful, such as the sale of guns and cigarettes to
children. Other portions are defensive expenditures that attempt to
offset the consequences of the social and environmental breakdown
caused by harmful growth. Examples include expenditures for security
devices and environmental cleanup. GDP further distorts our reality by
the fact that it is a measure of gross domestic product. The
depreciation or depletion of natural, social, human, institutional, or
even human-made capital is not deducted. So when we cut down our
forests, the sale is counted as pure benefit. There is no accounting
for the loss of the trees and related ecosystem functions.

In
each country where economists have adjusted GDP to arrive at a figure
for net beneficial economic output, they have concluded that the
economy's net contribution to well-being has actually been declining
over the past 15 to 20 years.

Yet even the resulting index of
net beneficial output is misleading; it doesn't reveal the extent to
which the economy's base of living capital assets is being reduced as
our forests, soils, fresh water, and fisheries are depleted faster than
they can regenerate, our social fabric unravels, our educational
standards decline, and our leading institutions lose their legitimacy.
The available data suggest that the rate of depletion of our living
capital is even greater than the rate of decline in beneficial economic
output.

Consider the implications. Our policy makers focus
their attention on financial asset and GDP indicators, which create the
illusion that their policies are making us richer - when in fact they
are making us poorer. Unfortunately, the indicators that would reveal
the truth are neither compiled nor reported.

Furthermore, the
financial assets that constitute claims over declining real wealth are
becoming ever more concentrated in a very few hands - in 1996 the
financial assets of 447 billionaires exceeded the annual incomes of the
poorest half of humanity. Those whose financial assets are growing
seemingly without limit see no problem, for in a global economy they
find it increasingly easy to access the best of whatever remains of the
Earth's living capital wherever it has survived. Indeed, as Paul Hawken
points out, it is the success of industrialism both in expanding its
throughput of resources and extending its reach across the globe that
has caused it to reach its limits so quickly and has created a crisis
for people and nature. Those in charge see only the success.

We
are running out of time. The human population is projected to reach 8
billion by the year 2025. We are feeding our present population of just
under 6 billion only by drawing down nonrenewable capital stocks of
cheap oil used to produce petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers
and to fuel heavy farm equipment and long-distance transport.

Meanwhile,
climate change induced by our increasingly extravagant use of carbon
fuels threatens to disrupt existing agricultural production everywhere
on the planet. We are as well accelerating the depletion of our soils,
water sources, fisheries, and forests. One ominous indicator of what
lies ahead is the growing number of countries dependent on food imports
to feed their own populations - the most troubling, because of the
numbers involved, being China.

The widening gap between rich
and poor continues to grow, increasing social tensions and undermining
the legitimacy of our institutions. A highly unstable and overextended
global financial system captive to financial speculators appears poised
at the verge of collapse.

Our leaders, lulled into complacency
by the "Don't worry, be happy" crowd of industry-funded scientists,
appear to have no clue as to how to deal with any of these problems.
Yet, as an optimistic guess, we may have at best a 20-year window of
opportunity following the year 2000 to negotiate a basic change in
direction (see Hardin Tibbs' article on page 24). It depends on us, the
ordinary citizens of planet Earth, to make it happen.

A deadly tale

The
task before us is no less a challenge than transforming a
life-consuming global economy into a system of life-nurturing local
economies. It is a task that calls us to examine some of our most
fundamental assumptions about the nature of life and reality. As Thomas
Berry suggested in Dream of the Earth

, we will need a new story to guide us.

The story that shaped the scientific-industrial era goes something like this:

The
universe is like a giant clockwork. It was set in motion by a master
clockmaker at the beginning of creation and left to run down with time
as its spring unwinds. In short, we live in a dead and wasting
universe. Matter is the only reality, and the whole is no more nor less
than the aggregation of its parts. By understanding the parts, we
understand and can control the whole. Through science, we gain dominion
over nature to bend it to our ends. Consciousness is an illusion, life
only an accidental outcome of material complexity. We evolved through a
combination of chance genetic mutations and a competitive struggle by
which those more fit survived and flourished as the weaker and less
worthy perished. Neither consciousness nor life has meaning or purpose.

Competition
for survival and territory is the basic law of nature. We cannot expect
humans to be or become more than brutish beasts driven by basic
instincts to survive, reproduce, and seek distraction from existential
loneliness through the pursuit of material gratification. A primary
function of the institutions of civilized societies is to use the
structures of hierarchy and markets to channel our dark human instincts
toward economically productive ends.

While it has outlived
its usefulness, in its time, this story played a constructive role in
human history; it launched the scientific revolution that gave
legitimacy to learning through empirical observation and liberated
Western societies from the intellectual tyranny of the Church. It
focused attention on mastering the material world and gave rise to
extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and technology, brought
previously unimaginable affluence to some 20 percent of the world
population, and gave us the ability to project ourselves into space.

On
the dark side, however, this story's underlying Hobbesian philosophy
led us to create the oppressive mega-institutions of the state and the
corporation, and a stratified economic system that honors and rewards
the most greedy among us. It has become a deeply alienating story that
denies our spiritual nature and leads us on a suicidal course.

A new story for a New Era

We
do truly need a new story that honors our advancing knowledge and
nurtures our development as fully human beings. We are in fact creating
a new story drawing inspiration from many sources - including the
world's richly varied and often ancient religious traditions and recent
findings of contemporary physical and life sciences.

This new story is taking shape through its telling by many creative minds and it goes something like this:

The
universe is a self-organizing system engaged in the discovery and
realization of its possibilities through a continuing process of
transcendence toward ever higher levels of order and self-definition.
Modern science has confirmed the ancient Hindu belief that all matter
exists as a continuing dance of flowing energies, yet is able to
maintain the integrity of its boundaries and internal structures, much
as the cells of a living organism maintain their own integrity and
individuality even as they function coherently as parts of a larger
whole. This implies some form of self-knowledge at each level of
organization in both "inert" matter and living organisms. Perhaps
self-aware intelligence, or consciousness, takes many forms and is in
some way pervasive and integral even to matter. Perhaps what we know as
life is not an accident of creation, but rather integral to it, an
attractor that shapes the creative unfolding of the cosmos.

We
have scarcely begun to imagine, much less experience, the possibilities
of our own capacity for intelligent, self-aware living. Nor have we
tested our potentials for self-directed cooperation as a foundation of
modern social organization. Evolution, though it involves competitive
struggles and the renewing cycles of life and death, reveals many
qualities of a fundamentally intentional, cooperative, and intelligent
enterprise.

There is substantial evidence indicating that it is
entirely natural for healthy humans to live fully and consciously in
service to the unfolding capacities of self and community. Nurturing
the creative development of the capacity of each and every person for
fully conscious living should be a primary function of the institutions
of civilized societies. It is time to create institutions that
recognize both the complexity and depth of human nature.

Unlike
the dead universe story, this story calls us to deepen our
understanding of life's self-organizing processes and of our own
conscious intelligence, and to master the art of living at both
individual and societal levels. It further calls us to embrace life as
society's defining value -- to give birth to a culture that values
sufficiency, cooperation, love, and stewardship; to create
self-regulating, nonhierarchical organizations that liberate and
celebrate our higher potentials; and to build economies that motivate
creative contribution, provide everyone access to an adequate and
fulfilling means of livelihood, and nurture the living systems of the
planet.

Twenty years is a brief time for six to nine billion
people to learn new ways of living and of relating to one another and
to the planet. But what an exciting challenge! As we glimpse the
potentials within our grasp, we begin to see there are good reasons to
look to the task with genuine enthusiasm. We have the opportunity to
bring our species to a new level of maturity defined by ever-higher
levels of consciousness, collective intelligence, freedom in coherent
service to the whole, and social and spiritual prosperity.

Endowing
this millennial point of the Western calendar with special significance
might be viewed as a superstitious behavior unworthy of the rational
mind. Yet it is evident that our continued growth as a species requires
that we engage in periodic processes of collective assessment and
renewal. Never in our history has there been a greater need. If the
turn of a millennium calls us to engage in collective reflection, then
let us rejoice in our good fortune and use the opportunity to full
advantage. For it happens to be at this instant that we need to work
together to create and give life to a new story for humanity.

David C. Korten is board chair of the Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES!, author of When Corporations Rule the World (Berrett-Koehler and Kumarian Press, 1995) and president of the People-Centered Development Forum. His most recent book, Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming our Right to Power,
is part of the Seven Stories Press Open Media Pamphlet Series
(1-800/596-7437).This article draws in part from the manuscript of his
forthcoming book, tentatively entitled Envisioning a Post-Corporate World, to be released in January 1999.

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